OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 27 December 2003 — Reeling from the first suicide bombing in Israel in nearly three months, Israel has decided to launch new strikes against leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Islamic Jihad militant movements.

Israeli media, quoting unnamed security officials, said the decision was taken at consultations Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz held with security officials yesterday to discuss a response to Thursday evening’s suicide bombing near Tel Aviv, in which a PFLP activist killed himself and four Israelis on a busy highway east of Tel Aviv.

In one of the first responses to the bombing, Israeli troops destroyed a house in the northern West Bank village of Beit Fourik which had belonged to the bomber, who had been named as 18-year-old Said Hanani.

The army also arrested two PFLP activists in the village, which lies east of Nablus. Immediately after the bombing Mofaz had ordered a closure slapped on the occupied territories, although Palestinian cities would not come under curfew.

The bombing was the first in Israel since Oct. 4, when a suicide bomber blew herself up in a restaurant in the northern city of Haifa, killing 23 people.

According to Israel Army Radio, defense chiefs told Mofaz yesterday they had over 50 warnings of impending attacks.

Sources quoted by Israel Army Radio warned of a power vacuum in the Palestinian Autonomous Areas, with smaller organization trying to carry out larger attacks to boost their status. Defense sources said leaders of the Hamas resistance organization would not be targeted along with those of the Islamic Jihad and the PFLP.

Hamas, the most prominent of the militant organizations, has carried out the most suicide bombings and other lethal attacks in Israel and the occupied territories, but army Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon said the organization has taken a strategic decision to call off attacks in the Jewish state, in response to Israeli attacks against its leaders.

“It is no coincidence that a group like Hamas decides to stop attacks within Israel, it comes from the realization that their organization is in danger,” Lt. Gen. Ya’alon told the Yediot Aharanot daily in an interview published yesterday.

In effect, the decision to target the PFLP and Islamic Jihad leaders does not mark a radical change of policy, since Israel has carried out dozens of assassinations against militant leaders and those activists planning, or on their way to carry out, attacks — “ticking bombs” in the Israeli definition.

One such strike — against what the army said was a ticking bomb — occurred only 30 minutes before the suicide bombing Thursday night, when Israeli helicopters rocketed a car driving in Gaza City.

The strike killed Moqled Hmeid, a senior member of the Islamic Jihad movement’s armed wing in Gaza, along with four other Palestinians, two of them militants and two of them bystanders. Mofaz said Hmeid, the Islamic Jihad military commander for the northern Gaza Strip, had been planning a “mega-attack” in the Strip.

In the West Bank, meanwhile, Israeli troops shot and wounded two protesters who were demonstrating against the security barrier Israel is constructing.

The two, an Israel and a foreign tourist from the “Anarchist Movement Against the Wall”, were lightly and moderately wounded.

Some 20,000 angry Palestinians buried one of Islamic Jihad’s top military chiefs as the group vowed “painful” reprisals against the Jewish state.

The funeral cortege set off from the impoverished Jabaliya refugee camp, north of Gaza, after midday (1000 GMT) prayers, heading for a nearby cemetery where Hmeid was to be buried. Another Jihad military leader, Nabil Shreihi, and three civilians were also killed in the airstrike and laid to rest yesterday at other Gaza graveyards. Hundreds of gunmen from the military wings of Islamic Jihad — the Al-Quds Battalions — and its bigger rival Hamas — the Ezzedin Al-Qassam Brigades — marched through the camp’s narrow alleyways. Some of them were masked. Top Jihad political leader Nafez Azzam, harangued the crowd, saying his movement would not be discouraged by Israel’s liquidations. “We will follow the very path on which chief Hmeid found martyrdom. Assassinations do not scare us,” he told the angry mourners.